The Red Queen as Historiographic Metafiction

Not only is The Red Queen a historical novel, but its occupation with the truth in historical writing already points to a metafictional level as well. Margaret Drabble has added an afterword to The Peppered Moth in order to explain why she wrote this book and why she composed it the way it is. She does the same in a prologue to The Red Queen. And again the author points out that she has not written a factual memoir but instead took her novelistic liberties with the genre of (auto-)biography. “Novelists”, the narrator of the second part of the novel entrusts to the reader and thus mirrors Drabble’s own view, “[…] are not to be trusted. They steal; they borrow; they appropriate” (RQ, 351). As a novelist, Margaret Drabble has taken up the Red Queen’s story and given a new form to it. She has read the real Korean Crown Princess’s (for, in fact, Lady Hyegyong has never been queen of her country) memoirs and by adding invention and interpretation she turned them into a novel.

Drabble has indeed turned history into fiction and thus deliberately questions if there is an ultimate truth in historiography and biography. Or, is it all story-telling? The author is therefore eager to point to the fact-fiction-dichotomy in historical writing and to admit her own, the novelist’s, voice in this story: “I do not know whether the Crown Princess loved her children, her husband or her father-in-law. I can only speculate. We know what custom dictated, but we do not know how fully custom was followed” (RQ, x). There are historical facts and there are gaps which can only be filled with fiction. Drabble voices in her prologue that she has done some research regarding Korean history in order to place the Crown Princess in a more or less correct setting of time and place. This is emphasized by the inclusion of a bibliography. Yet, Drabble is also ready to point out that “Professor Haboush, whose work first introduced me to this material, does not endorse my interpretation” (RQ, viii) and that Haboush as a historian wishes “to dissociate herself […] from this work of fiction and fancy” (ibid.). Margaret Drabble’s inclusion of this bibliography and her various references to the books she herself has read as well as naming books her protagonists and the ghost have consulted⁶⁴ point to an important aspect of metafiction – paratextuality.

Texts illuminate each other and the given text can thus be related to other literary texts or

64 Drabble’s is therefore a prime example of a historical novel considering that “[h]istorical novels are obsessed with paratexts: footnotes, additions, acknowledgements, bibliographies, author information, maps” (de Groot, 63). And Jerome de Groot adds that “[f]rom these materials we can garner a huge amount of information about the text itself, how it is being presented and represented” (ibid). Thus the work – a fictional account completed with historical information – conveys a certain authenticity while at the same time being self-conscious about its artificiality.

generic conventions or social discourses. Reading and writing are of considerable importance to the characters of The Red Queen just as they are to the author of the novel. Since Babs reads the Crown Princess’s memoirs, tells Margaret Drabble about them who eventually writes about them, the relationship between past and present is indeed experienced through reading and writing, a notion which points again to the quotation from The Russian Ark at the beginning of the novel. A.S. Byatt further points out that “the genre of the ghost story” is “an embodiment of the relations between readers and writers, between the living words of dead men and the modern conjurers of their spirits” (HS, 43). The novel also refers to a film and thus draws parallels between film and text as well. Historiography and auto-/biography clearly depend on the one writing them, especially the latter, since memory is always subjective and mirrors one person’s mind. But Drabble also suggests that they rely on the one reading and at times, re-telling, them for “there are (and have been) many possible interpretations of the story, and mine is only one of them” (RQ, viii). The emphasis on the reader as well as on the act of reading is also a feature of metafictionality since in metafictional texts the reader is often directly (as in The Peppered Moth) or indirectly addressed and thus been made part of the whole process of fiction-making. In metafictional writing the relationship between writer, character, plot and reader is put to the forefront.

Drabble has therefore included herself as a reader and a writer while thus emphasizing how historiography and fiction is interpreted and constructed. Metafiction, it has to be noted, simultaneously creates fiction and makes a statement about the creation of that fiction (comp. Hutcheon 1983, 6).

Historiography is never complete nor its composer omniscient. Instead it is open to individual opinion and interpretation. This is also emphasized by the ghost of the Crown Princess, who functions as the narrator of the first part of The Red Queen, titled “Ancient Times”: “I will narrate what I take to be the facts, as I have been told them, and I will add some of my memories, though I am well aware that personal memories may be reinforced or undermined to the point of disbelief by family memory. None of us has full access to even our own stories” (RQ, 7). This disembodied spirit of the Red Queen exists in our times, reads newspapers and books, and surfs the internet. She uses all of these sources to refurbish her life-story, draw comparisons and explain in retrospect (e.g. RQ, 12; 20; 46), just as historiographers and also novelists do. However, she is, as Gerda Leeming summarizes, not

“able to see hidden events or personal motives, so her account remains, as the real author in

the prologue says, merely one of many possible interpretations” (Leeming, 110). To stress the unreliability of the historiographer/biographer, Drabble has chosen a ghost as the narrator of Lady Hyegyong’s memoir. The ghost’s narrative is moreover told from the first person’s point of view and is hence “preoccupied with the desirability and impossibility of objectivity and truthfulness” (HS, 102). Drabble thus also turns away from a claim to truthfulness in historical narrative and instead once again emphasizes its fictionality. The author further explains that “by making her [the Red Queen] able to comment posthumously on her own life, [Drabble] was able to explore the modern world too. One of the books [the author] read while writing this novel was Mark Twain’s brilliant and extraordinary fantasy, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which explores similar questions of cultural relativism and cultural identity, and uses time travel to satirize the United States in the nineteenth century” (interview with Drabble: www.harcourtbooks.com/authorinterviews/

booksinterview_Drabble.asp). In combination with the prologue, the afterword, and the bibliography, this narrator pinpoints The Red Queen’s metafictional aspect. Considering once again Ansgar Nünning’s introduction to historiographic metafiction, it becomes clear that The Red Queen follows along those lines and sets itself apart from the documentary historical novel:

Ebenso wie im Zuge der von Arthur Danto, Michel Foucault, Dominick LaCapra, Hayden White u.a. initiierten Debatten das Objektivitätsideal des Historismus durch die Einsicht in die Subjektabhängigkeit, Theoriegebundenheit und Konstruktivität der Historiographie ersetzt worden ist, schärfen auch die für historiographic metafiction kennzeichnenden metahistoriographischen Reflexionen das Bewusstsein dafür, dass die geschichtliche Welt dem Historiker nicht direkt zugänglich ist, sondern nur in sprachlich vermittelter Form von Beschreibungen. Im Gegensatz zu der Annahme, dass Quellen einen direkten Zugang zu Fakten liefern und ein transparentes Medium sind, das einen unverzerrten Blick auf die Vergangenheit ermöglicht, betonen [solche] Romane […], dass Historiker durch die Auswahl und narrative Anordnung des Materials ihre Objekte selbst konstruieren und dass auch historiographische Werke sprachliche Konstrukte sind, die narrative Darstellungsmuster verwenden. (Nünning 1999, 37)

Drabble has chosen two different narrators for the two distinct parts of her novel.

Whereas the ghost tells the Red Queen’s story in the past tense, the third-person narrator of the second part aptly uses present tense. Besides these two narrators, Drabble has also included her own voice, that of the real author, to narrate the prologue and the afterword.

She furthermore introduces herself as a character towards the end of the novel (RQ, 349),

inhabiting a sort of “cameo role” (Leeming, 111). Drabble’s character befriends Barbara Halliwell and gets introduced by her to the story of the Red Queen: “The novelist had dutifully read the memoirs of the Crown Princess, and had professed herself as struck by them as Babs herself had been. In a way, Babs now feels she has handed over the Crown Princess to a suitable recipient and can forget about her” (RQ, 350).⁶⁵ Deciding to write about her, Drabble indeed functions as the Red Queen’s ghost-writer. Consequently, as Kathleen Coyne Kelly points out, “[i]n this novel, […] the author – or the text, if you prefer – challenges us to rethink our expectations about texts and textuality and to contemplate the very nature of making fiction” (Kelly, xii). With its focus on form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination, The Red Queen uncovers the process of creation and construction of an artifact.